Maybe that sounds ridiculous, but someone actually built such a thing. The video above shows the handiwork of dekuNukem, who built what they call a 'hands free shiny finder.' The machine will go into a Pokémon encounter on its own via a microcontroller hooked up to the 3DS. This part is simple enough; the machine presses buttons in a certain order.

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Here's where the machine gets particularly brilliant: it turns out that the easiest way to tell if you're in a shiny encounter is to look at the bottom screen. Shiny Pokémon have special animations, which means that at the start of the battle, it takes longer for the bottom screen to load. So what the machine does is, it uses a light sensor to measure how long the bottom screen is blacked out for in an encounter. If its blacked out for long enough, the machine will sound an alarm, and the user can come over and try to catch the Pokémon. If it's not a shiny encounter, it'll simply run away and then will find another encounter. Eventually, though, it'll find a shiny—it might take a while, but hey, the player doesn't actually have to be present for the boring parts.

The power of science! I think I'll stick to leaving my shiny encounters up to chance. It's not that this is more noble or something, I'm just lazy—but props to dekuNukem for coming up with something so genius. My how far we've come from the days of trying to capture shiny Ponytas...